SMERT VAZIR-MUKHTARA.

As I wrote here, I’ve been reading Tynyanov’s Смерть Вазир-Мухтара [Smert’ Vazir-mukhtara], “The death of the vazir-mukhtar [ambassador plenipotentiary],” and now that I’ve finished it, I’m trying to figure out why I didn’t like it more than I did. Tynyanov is a fine writer (as well as a brilliant critic), and I certainly enjoyed his novella Podporuchik Kizhe (“Lieutenant Kije”), but I found the novel something of a slog. It wasn’t just that the characters were uniformly unsympathetic, and it certainly wasn’t a failure to paint an adequate background for the protagonist Griboyedov‘s doings—in fact, it was the well-drawn picture of Qajar Iran and its courtly intrigues that kept me going toward the end. No, I think Chukovsky hit the nail on the head in his diary entry for March 17, 1926, discussing the excerpts Tynyanov read him: “They were well written—too well written. He overdoes the archaic style. There isn’t a line left unstylized. The result is overly concentrated, lacking in inner truth, smacking of ‘literature.'” [Отрывки хорошо написаны — но чересчур хорошо. Слишком густо дан старинный стиль. Нет ни одной не стилизованной строки. Получаются одни эссенции, то есть внутренняя ложь, литературщина.] And as I was trying to finish last week’s New Yorker (the new one has already come), I found that James Wood, in his review essay on David Mitchell, has things to say that are equally relevant to Tynyanov:

Mitchell is ancestral in another respect, too. He may be self-conscious, but he is not knowing, in the familiar, fatal, contemporary way; his naturalness as a storyteller has to do not only with his vitality but also with a kind of warmth, a charming earnestness. This is why he can so speedily get a fiction up and running, involve the reader in an invented world. One would be hard pressed to separate the quality of his sentences from the quality of the human presence.[…]

Despite the novel’s liveliness and deep immersion in the foreignness of its world, there is something a bit mystifying about its distance from contemporary life, something a little contrived in its brilliant autonomy. The publisher promises “a bold and epic novel of a rarely visited point in history,” and this is not wrong, except that choosing rarely visited points in history for novelization seems to lack inner necessity. Mitchell’s new novel has already been likened to Tolstoy, but Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace” because he felt compelled to examine and dramatize a great national crisis, and it is that compulsion that makes “War and Peace” a novel of the eighteen-sixties, and not merely “a novel of 1812.”

It is precisely War and Peace that kept occurring to me as a point of comparison as I read Tynyanov, who sometimes seems to be deliberately playing off its methods. It is, of course, unfair to use Tolstoy as a stick to beat another novelist with, but I think it’s reasonable to point out the difference between Tolstoy’s compulsion (the mot juste, as one expects from Wood) and Tynyanov’s… desire to illustrate his critical theories? I’m frankly not sure what made him want to write historical novels (this was his second), but one doesn’t get the sense that he had a burning need to tell us this particular story. And there is certainly none of the warmth and “charming earnestness” Wood sees in Mitchell; this is even more unfair, of course, but let’s face it, “the quality of the human presence” is something most of us look for in a piece of writing, and here it’s so dry and arm’s-length it doesn’t invite us in or lure us onward.

I think the main point Tynyanov wanted to emphasize is the ways in which a title, and the role that goes with it, can take over a life (and cause a death). Here are a few salient quotes involving the Persian phrase vazir-mukhtar ‘ambassador plenipotentiary,’ which provides both the book and its hero with a title:

Abu’l-Kasim-Khan came up to him in a gold-embroidered robe and bowed low:
“Bon voyage, votre Excellence, notre cher et estimé Vazir-Mouchtar.”
Griboedov sat in the coach.
Thus he became the Vazir-Mukhtar.

And it was true that the Vazir-Mukhtar saw himself in mirrors. But he tried not to look for long. The tenfold, brightly colored Vazir-Mukhtar did not bring any special pleasure to Alexander Griboyedov.
[И правда, Вазир-Мухтар видел себя в зеркалах. Но он старался не смотреть долго. Удесятеренный, расцвеченный Вазир-Мухтар не приносил особого удовольствия Александру Грибоедову.]

After his death (which is slipped in casually), it is repeated several times that “the Vazir-Mukhtar continued to exist” [Вазир-Мухтар продолжал существовать]. When a false story of his death, putting all the blame on him, is told to and accepted by the Russian court:

The Vazir-Mukhtar moved no more.
He did not exist either now or earlier.
Eternity.
[Вазир-Мухтар более не шевелился.
Он не существовал ни теперь, ни ранее.
Вечность.]

And in the final chapter, when another Russian is named ambassador to the Qajar court: “The Vazir-Mukhtar was now another” [Вазир-Мухтар был ныне другой]. In a way, he’s making the same point he did with Lieutenant Kije, but the novella was a lot shorter, and funnier.

This is totally irrelevant, but I can’t resist quoting a paragraph from David Mitchell’s new novel that Wood also couldn’t resist quoting; it shows why I like Mitchell so much, and why I’m looking forward to reading more of him:

“On Mr Grote’s last trip home,” obliges Ouwehand, “he wooed a promising young heiress at her town house in Roomolenstraat who told him how her heirless, ailing papa yearned to see his dairy farm in the hands of a gentleman son-in-law, yet everywhere, she lamented, were thieving rascals posing as eligible bachelors. Mr Grote agreed that the Sea of Courtship seethes with sharks and spoke of the prejudice endured by the young colonial parvenu, as if the annual fortunes yielded by his plantations in Sumatra were less worthy than old monies. The turtledoves were wedded within a week. The day after their nuptials, the taverner presented the bill and each says to the other, ‘Settle the account, my heart’s music.’ But to their genuine horror, neither could, for bride and groom alike had spent their last beans on wooing the other! Mr Grote’s Sumatran plantations evaporated; the Roomolenstraat house reverted to a co-conspirator’s stage prop; the ailing father-in-law turned out to be a beer porter in rude health, not heirless but hairless.”

Addendum. There’s a new Russian television serial based on the novel; you can watch it here. It’s in ten parts; I’ve watched the first (45 minutes) and enjoyed it greatly.

Comments

As the author of a (now out of print) translation of
Горе от ума I’ve always been intrigued by this book, but could never get into it.
It was listed by Harry Matthews in a PEN survey that asked writers what untranslated
books they would most like to see translated.

He’s not very sure of himself: “As far as I know, Tinyanov’s novel … has never been translated; if this is the case I would strongly recommend it for your list.” I guess he didn’t take the request very seriously.

I also couldn’t get into this book… I read about 100 pages last winter and then set it aside. I think you’re right, languagehat, that there’s nothing inviting or alluring about it, at least in practice. I was expecting to love it — as Alan Shaw says, it sounds intriguing — but everything about it felt flat.

Mitchell’s little anecdote is an exact duplicate of an episode in Moll Flanders, right down to spending their last bean on wooing each other, and (if I remember rightly) the bit about paying the hotel bill.

In that excerpt, Moll sounds more candid than she actually was: she did, in fact, originate the false rumors of her own wealth, but so subtly that no one suspected it; and was careful to never seem to confirm them.

It seems odd to see the words wazir and mukhtar linked. Jordanian wazeers are cabinet-level advisors to the King. Muchtars are the ones who remember all the family relationships. If you need to prove who you are, you don’t have a birth certificate, you get a letter from your mukhtar. Mayors are elected, mukhtars inherit the position by reason of being related to everyone whose births they remember. Wazirs are appointed and change chairs quite frequently, sometimes as often as once a year.

And Farsi is not Arabic is not Russian. But still, it’s rather startling to see these familiar Arabic words written in Russian practically unchanged (although “wazir” has been used enough in English fiction).

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